I've spent some time making an argument that the people of Gaza are being murdered and that peace in Palestine is not served by the current attack by the Israeli Defense Forces. I can make some argument for Gazans. I have not tried to argue the other side. I have not been sympathetic. At one time I held the Spanish people responsible for the destruction of meso America. That was unfair. But, it struck me that native American civilizations should not have been destroyed for the benefit of Europeans. Now, it strikes me as inhuman and cruel to steal Palestine from the people who were living there for the benefit of Europeans and Americans.
I think we need to examine the arguments given to justify the Israeli position. Do they have an argument? Are they any good? Here's one given by a British Conservative Party Leader. The story appeared here, titled: '' Boycotters are bunch of loons" by Marc Shoffman- Thursday 14th June 2007 on TOTALLYJEWISH.COM.
Conservative Party leader David Cameron this week branded those who describe Israel as a "pariah state" as a "bunch of loons."
Speaking at the Conservative Friends of Israel's Annual Business Lunch at the Savoy Hotel on Tuesday, he said that boycotts of Israel are damaging and stated his support for the country.
He described calls for a boycott of Israel in the UK as "damaging" and "worrying" and warned that criticizing Israel can sometimes lead to anti-semitism.
Cameron said: "It's disturbing that a boycott is happening here, there is no justification for treating Israel as a pariah state, it may be by a bunch of loons deciding on it but the motion is profoundly worrying and damaging.
"Attacks on Israel can sometimes spill into anti-semitism."
He gave his backing to Israel's security Wall but warned that new settlements may damage peace negotiations, "The West has to understand that there is no equivalence between the democratically elected government in Israel, member of the United Nations, and groups like Hamas." The Security Wall has clearly worked but putting it around new settlements will make negotiations more difficult."
http://www.totallyjewish.com/news/national/?content_id=6495
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/david_cameron3.html
David Cameron
Mr. Cameron is said here to characterize those who say Israel is a 'pariah state' are a "bunch of loons." He probably means they are a collection of "crazy or deranged" people. The effort to speak so ill of his adversaries does not speak well of Mr. Cameron. My cousin might be a crazy and deranged person and therefore confined to a mental hospital, but that unfortunate condition of his has not clouded his perception of my brother, who has always lied to our parents. Mr. Cameron speaks about Palestinians and others who criticize Israel as though they no one need pay any attention to the addled. Yet, their problems often are still true.
Mr. Cameron is childish to try to undermine his opponents in such a way. It is like saying we don't have to listen to complaints about my brother's lying because my cousin has been institutionalized. The one fact about my cousin does not justify avoiding my brother's problem with the truth.
Mr. Cameron brings up the fact that people are so upset at what Israel has been doing to Palestinians and especially Gazans that they are working to boycott Israeli goods and Universities. Mr. Cameron says these " boycotts of Israel are damaging." Frankly, the point of a boycott is to damage Israel so the thought that they would would encourage those who argue for them The reason that they argue for boycotts has to do with the terrible things that Israel is doing and so the boycotts are intended to damage Israel enough that they would stop being so terrible.
Mr. Cameron is suggesting that the boycotts are damaging the country unfairly. He suggests that there is no good reason to damage Israel. In fact, the injury caused by these boycotts, according to Mr. Cameron, may lead to an even more serious injury involving a breakout of "anti-semitism."
Mr. Cameron believes there can be nothing wrong with Israel. The attempt to make a case for there being something wrong, and to go beyond that accusation to try to dissuade Israel from doing anything bad, has to be crazy and deranged.
Mr. Cameron may be unable to see any merit in his opponents case. He may, on the other hand, see merits but be unwilling to mention them in front of his audience who themselves not be able able to see any of their opponents' merits. Be that as it may, it seems obvious that Mr. Cameron refuses to consider the merits of his opponents case and so is forced to try to explain them by saying they are crazy. Their concerns also need to be ignored because there are more important problems that might arise if we spent any time paying attention to them. According to Mr. Cameron, there might be this terrible thing called anti-Semitism arise.
My brother gets angry when anyone points out that he lies. So, the rest of my family feels compelled to tell my crazy cousin whenever he's around to be quiet about my brother. They don't want to have to deal with my brother's anger and sometimes his fits of rage. Whenever my brother lies, it seems, it's usually about the fact that he's stealing from my mother. Well, like the rest of my family, Mr. Cameron would rather the advocates for Palestinians keep quite about Israel's stealing their land, maybe because like my family, he doesn't want to have to deal with Israel's fits of rage whenever anyone points these facts out.
Mr. Cameron went on to say, "The West has to understand that there is no equivalence between the democratically elected government in Israel, member of the United Nations, and groups like Hamas." But, because the report fails to give a full accounting for his argument, there is no explanation of why this observation is made. The question that people who complain about Israel's treatment of Gazans and the Palestinian people have is what needs to be done to keep Israel from making them suffer. Whether or not there is any equivalence between the Israeli government and Hamas is irrelevant to this question. The fact is, it is always unacceptable to make a population suffer in order to make a political statement. So, whatever Hamas might be doing, it is cruel and unacceptable for Israel to make the Palestinian people suffer.
Mr Cameron says he supports the Wall. The wall is a large structure designed to separate where Israeli settlements are from where Palestinians live on the west bank. He points out his support, I suppose, as a way to indicate he is for various measures to bring the peace in Palestine. The presence of Israeli settlements on the west bank is itself an issue about which the Israelis and the Palestinians fight about. He indicates his willingness to advocate for the Israeli side as opposed to the Palestinian by his support of this wall.
Given his initial unwillingness to allow that his opponents are reasonable, his support for the Israeli side with respect to what to do about the west bank, and his general one-sided ness about the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, I understand Mr. Cameron to be an advocate for Israel, but one who belittles and abuses his opponents. He is,therefore, childish and biased. Not someone I'd have arguing my side.
In another story written around the same time, this was said,
Asked about recent campaigns to boycott and delegitimize Israel, Cameron said there was no justification for a boycott. "Israel is a democratic country and these Trotskyists [a reference to the radical Left, who forefront the boycott campaign] are treating Israel as some sort of pariah state," Cameron said. "[They] may be a bunch of lunatics, but what they are doing is profoundly wrong and profoundly damaging," he added.
Cameron also thought that attacks on Israel could spill over into anti-Semitism. "I think our mayor [Ken Livingstone] in this great city of London... is guilty of that," he said.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181570268668&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
I want to go to a more recent argument made by Mr. Livingston about the current attack by Israel on Gaza. Mr. Livingston wrote in the Guardian,
This approach is a green light for Israel to continue unavoidably indiscriminate attacks on the most densely populated territory in the world. To stop this, a change in the attitude of our own and other European governments is essential.
That requires an analysis that fits the facts. First, this is not a conflict between two equivalent forces. Hamas's weapons are crude and inaccurate missiles capable of causing fear, naturally, but not of damage or death remotely approaching the scale of what Israel has inflicted upon Gaza. Second, the original ceasefire, which expired on December 19, was violated from the beginning by Israel. From the start, it failed to end its illegal blockade of Gaza within the 10 days envisaged. Instead, it was tightened, cutting off food, fuel, medicine and all movement of people, in and out. Alongside this, Israel continued military attacks, killing more than 20 people during what was supposed to be a ceasefire.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2903879.ece
Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, Nov. 2007
That is why the majority of people in Gaza saw no point in renewing an agreement under which they were being slowly throttled. Israel 's government well understood that for a ceasefire to be meaningful, the siege of Gaza had to end. Instead, it tightened the screw to the point where it created enough tension to justify the present onslaught in the run-up to its elections.
Third, Gaza cannot be seen in isolation. It is part of a wider picture of systematic flouting by Israel of all efforts to broker peace with the Palestinians, as, for example, the illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank continues apace.
For all of these reasons, the false narrative of David Miliband and other western leaders that there is some kind of equivalence between the actions of Hamas and of Israel, or even that Israel is simply defending itself, must end. The way out of the immediate situation is obvious. Israel must call off its military campaign. The blockade of Gaza must end and Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel. That respects the right to life and security of both the Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas has said it would accept these terms.
But the Israeli government has made clear it has no intention of agreeing to such a reasonable way out. That is why international pressure to end the killing is essential. The present US administration will do nothing; it is to be hoped that Barack Obama will take a different approach when he takes office. In the meantime, it falls to the European Union and our own government to act.
As a first step, European ambassadors should be recalled from Israel until the military offensive stops. And Britain should lead by example. Second, the European Union/Israel trade agreement should be suspended, as its human rights provisions have clearly been violated.
Third, if these measures do not bring rapid results, further and stronger action will be required. Europe is a critical trade partner for Israel. We have the economic leverage to end this conflict. We should use it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/04/gaza-israel-hamas-palestinians
In this essay we get a chance to see someone who does argue for a boycott of Israel. Mr. Livingston says,
"...If these measures do not bring rapid results, further and stronger action will be required. Europe is a critical trade partner for Israel. We have the economic leverage to end this conflict. We should use it."
The recommendation of a boycott of Israeli goods comes from Mr. Livingston as part of an effort to change Israel's behavior, behavior towards the Palestinians that Mr. Livingston and others find objectionable. The damage that may be done by such a boycott would be justified, on Mr. Livingston's view, because it would be used only after other less drastic measures might prove unsuccessful.
For Mr. Livingston, there is a balance between the killing of these innocent Palestinians and the injury that such a boycott of Israeli goods might produce. He finds that it would be justified to cause whatever injury the economic boycott would cause if it would stop the killing of innocent people by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Mr. Cameron never explains in this quoted story exactly why he thinks the defense of innocent Palestinians is a crazy or deranged idea. We can chalk that complaint up to rhetorical flourish.
Mr. Cameron is also not quoted trying to explain how or in what way Mr. Livingston's defense of Palestinians leads him to be anti-Semitic.
I want here to quote the entire piece Mr. Livingston wrote for the Guardian responding to the claim that for his arguments, Mr. Livingston was shown to be anti-Semitic. On March 4th, 2005, he wrote,
Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity.
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.
No serious commentator has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard reporter outside City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted on these pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century".
The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.
As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north London eruv.
Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish organizations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organizations campaigning for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli government.
Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.
The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the policies of successive Israeli governments.
To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.
Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state. The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.
Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict. There are more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel's jails.
To obscure these truths, those around Israel's present government have resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of objective information but in reality selectively translates material from Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.
Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.
All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticizes the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognize the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.
They are also fueling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.
· Ken Livingstone is the London mayor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/mar/04/society.london
The mayor here argues that he has as mayor worked to expose and prosecute anti-Semitic activities in London. He points out that he is being demonized, not because he supports or advocates anti-Semitism, but because he opposes particular acts and policies of Israel that are themselves immoral. He claims the people who accuse him of anti-Semitism conflate anti_Semitism with his opposition to the policies and behavior of Israel. It's this conflation which is used to make him into an opponent of Jews and some kind of anti-Semite.
Mr. Livingston makes a good point. But, his critics, like Mr. Cameron, have not given the Mayor any credit for pointing out their persistent rhetorical confabulations. They seem to maintain their poop doesn't stink.
Those who argue on Israel's side like to misrepresent and exaggerate things before they build an erroneous argument.
An example is the crocodile tears about the possibility of Israel being "boycotted" by other middle eastern countries.
Israel is supported unconditionally and without limit by the US and has worldwide interests of immense wealth, Jewish communities worldwide enjoy protective status at a level never experienced before by any minority anywhere. They are the preferred of the preferred in the western world.
When the land of Palestine was being occupied by Zionist settlers aided by British occupation forces from 1936 to 1948, causing the deaths and expulsions of over a million Palestinians and consequently giving room for these Jewish settlers to declare a Jewish state in 1948, Israel became the largest symbol of robbery through genocide and war on a passive people. Arab countries surrounding Palestine at that time where backward in technology and still used camels and horses. These Arab countries such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq have just gained their freedoms themselves from the British and French.
Israel did not trade with these Arab countries and never depended on them for anything. Israel was itself formed on most of Palestine and supported tooth and nail by the west, the Arabs did not even register on the radar as far as trade goes.
Then in 1967, when Israel occupied the rest of Palestine, and kicked out more Palestinians, the Arab nations were not trading with Israel either. Israel was formed on Palestine, the mediterranean coast of Palestine is long enough to keep Israel in contact with its massive interests in Europe and the US.
The Arabs have never had an effect on Israel trade wise. Israel is highly supported by western governments in Europe and the US, and has a very prosperous minority Jewish communities everywhere. The Arabs never supplied Israel with anything that it desperately needed anyway, neither then nor now.
So when the pro-Israel propaganda and those who are allies of Israel try to divert attention from the massacre of Palestinian civilians in one of the last remaining reservations where the last remaining Palestinian natives exist, known as the GAZA strip, and start talking about Arabs boycotting Israel, it shouldn't fool anyone that this is just a diversion tactic to distract the world from the genocide that Israel is committing against that Palestinians in Gaza.
Sam Little
Posted by: Sam Little / to boycott or not to boycott, what a pile of Rubbish | January 17, 2009 at 02:22 AM